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I interviewed a new grad the other day, I asked alien dictionary, couldnt solve it. So I moved on to regular expression matching. couldnt solve it. So I asked my last one which was a complex DP question, still couldnt solve it. I was amazed....

Had someone come and tell us about his Master's Degree in Computer Science he just received. Okay, good to know.

I asked him what a race condition was. He didn't know. I asked him to describe to me the basics of TCP/IP, which was in the job description. He choked on the question. We got him some water, did a resume overview, and dismissed him. He then sent me an email with his GitHub username - and his password.

I was joking. A few of my friends went to SJSU. Some are great, but the rest are weak and I give them a hard time. I did hear a lot of stories about self taught engineers often being much more skilled than ones who went to college. Why do you think that is? And what specifically about the mindset was it that clicked with you guys?

The guy was the type who would go down rabbit holes and learn a crap ton in the end. He had a problem with race conditions, so he learned about using stacks and queues to pipe actions. He learned React and studied how to make modular code that made sense and worked. He learned about networking while building his own remote controlled WiFi robot.

He was motivated and passionate. And hungry to learn more. Someone who genuinely enjoyed our field.

one guy apped and got screened out then apped again with a weird executable (python) cover letter that told a story about him working at the company. In the interview we would ask "how would you do X?" and he would say "well I would ask my colleagues about it and we'd come up with something"

After he tried to solve my exercise by writing a lot of pseudocode non sense to the whiteboard, I asked him to just make a function returning True if the argument of the function equals a specific word in the language he wants. He wasn't able to do it...